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Wednesday, January 14, 2015

As a political animal, I do tend to see Modernity as an ideology, not an Era

I freely admit, that as a longtime political animal (and as an Dal '80 political science graduate) I do tend to see the world through the glasses of 'political' ideologies.

That is, I see our internal/personal ways of viewing reality ultimately having sharp public/political (power/force/violence) consequences.

So, in many ways, JANUS MANHATTAN'S CHILDREN is as much a work of political science as it is of history.

This is because of its focus on WWII's shortfall between modernity's ideologies and physical reality.

This will encompass, just for example, examining the pre-WWII ideas about armies clashing vs WWII actual acted-out clash of physical armies vs post-WWII ideas about what did happen during those clashes.

War imagined (pre and post) versus War lived, to freely adapt Lucy Riall's definition of the new approach to biography in academic history.

History is particular good at going into German and Soviet archives and counting dead tanks to find out if Prokhorovka's reputed claim as the 'greatest tank battle in history' actually happened as publicly remembered.

While Political Science is excellent at determining what public/political capital that all the world's soldiers, politicians, deniers and video game designers made out of Prokhorovka's myth.

Similarly, conventional histories of WWII strategy are content to simply that the UK had less population and soldiers than Germany and so Britain was loath to invade Europe without American help.

But I intend to ask what private prejudices lay behind the Allied unwillingness to think of getting the 6 million strong volunteer dark-skinned Indian Army to invade occupied Europe --- instead of a waiting for a mere million white American conscripts instead ?

But I suspect that so strong is the hold of Modernity-cum-racism still upon the western mind that historians - even today - are loath to even think my suggestion can be taken seriously enough to be examined before being dismissed.

This is why I so adamantly reject the claim of Modernity 'merely' being a period in time (an Era), a period of time when the ideology of socialism/communism clashed with those of liberal/conservative capitalism and of fascism.

Instead I see these admittedly better known ideologies as being (during the Era of Modernity hegemony) absorbed into and completely affected by, the larger and newer supra-ideology of Modernity.

Similarly, in the hetro hegemony of today's Era of Postmodernity, these sub-ideologies along with that of the fading Modernity survive (all in altered postmodern forms) but all must compete against the fastest rising supra-ideology of Open Commensality....

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